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Thursday, 10 January 2019

The whole point of Brexit

This is going to be a difficult post to write. I was challenged yesterday to demonstrate the benefits of Brexit for Remainers. Good idea. Let's look at their concerns and counter them, was my initial thought. The arguments against Brexit fall largely into two sorts; first is the stance of a privileged elite of achievers, who argue on economic, trade, legal, philosophic and rational grounds, argue that sovereignty is silly poo-poo and that glorious globalism is the only sensible way ahead. Well, we've argued all those points to death, and only actual Brexit will prove who is right.

The second sort of argument is that which one hears constantly on social media, on MSM interviews with the young, with students and travellers, with EU workers in Britain, from metropolitan remainers, and is far more personal and self-concerned. It is that Brexit will constrain their rights, their freedoms, their free stuff. Erasmus, free rail passes, EU subsidies for universities sending students to study in other nations. The more hysterical will howl that Brexit is stopping them travelling to, living and working in Europe. One can argue, demonstrate and reason that Brexit will have little effect on any of these rights - but will probably curtail the hidden subsidy paid by UK taxpayers for some 'free' stuff such as medical treatment. This is one of the most heinous costs. The UK charges the EU27 for medical treatment for EU citizens in the UK, and the EU27 charge the NHS for treatments provided in Europe to Brits. It's what the EHIC does.Except we pay the EU about £775m a year but the NHS only collects £50m a year.

I could have gone on but would have been wasting my time. Figures and facts and lists won't counter the injury the second group have received - which is to their sense of entitlement. Their outrage is due to their deep sense of entitlement to ease, comfort and convenience having been offended. We're taking away free stuff. Facts and reason can't counter that.

Then I watched 'Brexit: The Uncivil War' again and was reminded what we are fighting for; people.

If you pop into Dot's in Jaywick fairly early, you may be surprised to see the quality 'broadsheets' amongst the piles of tabloids. Nowhere, not even Jaywick, is a stereotype. Although the ONS tells us that 50% of residents here have no qualifications at all, 7% have a degree and 4% a professional occupation. I know this to be true. I used to sail these waters and know people. One such who helped me with great kindness lived not in Jaywick but in a caravan at nearby St Osyth. He had a degree from Edinburgh and could crack through the Times crossword, but drink had cost him a life, job and marriage. When you look at pictures such as this and wonder who lives in these places, don't make assumptions.

Independent, bloody-minded but poor retired people who shun Council or sheltered accommodation. Long-term sick and chronically disabled. And if you've seen Ken Loach's film, here live the Daniel Blakes. Maybe a third of residents have some sort of work, but those in full time employment get out whilst they can, to addresses not on credit blacklists, away from the pervasive sourness of quiet desperation.

Jaywick is not somewhere known to the rich middle-class kids ligging taxpayers for their Erasmus holidays, fleecing taxpayers for their medical care when they fall off their skateboards in Ibitha. Their new iPhones cost ten weeks income for many Jaywick residents, their trainers a month's food. And their concerns for the people who live in these places? They want them to die, to reduce the Brexit vote.

When I watched these scenes in the C4 dramadoc I felt anger, compassion, frustration and pride in equal measure. We are either One Nation or we are nothing. We either spurn selfish grasping privilege or we are demeaned. When did sharp-elbows and rapacious self-interest become middle class virtues? When was it OK to discard whole cohorts of people such as these? If I voted Brexit for anything, it was to win back from the globalists, from the bureaucracy of the unelected elite, from the fat, corrupt and uncaring establishment, some measure of redress, some correction to these imbalances.

And yes, there is one over-riding and critically important thing that Brexit can do for Remainers. It is to show them that their fellow man is not just the native they met on their gap year in Thailand, but the older bloke in the TKMaxx trackies in the Co-op queue at home counting the coins in his palm.

42 comments:

Jack the dog
said...

Radders that's a good post, rather moving in fact.

The advantages of Brexit accrue to all of us equally as it is a restoration of the way things ought to be.

Our forebears fought with greater or lesser intensity for 2000 years to achieve the democratic settlement of one man one vote, no taxation with representation, and fundamentally the right of the British as a nation to have a clear transparent and effective method of removing governments they don't like and installing new ones, a simple mechanism which ensures that to some extent at least the interest of government and people are aligned.

The EU is the opposite. It is fundamentally, and by design undemocratic. It is a platonic construction, the bastard offspring of french Napoleonic code and Germanic hegelism.

Britain could never happily integrate without losing its vital national character which let's face it has shaped an awful lot of what is good in the world.

All the little privileges which remainers like can be obtained easily by inter-governmental cooperation as used to happen. None of them require the subsuming of national sovereignty into the Barlaymont.

We leavers have stood by and watched the remainers in government, the civil service the media and the rest collude with a foreign power to prevent the legitimate expression of our will to a change of sovereignty.

The lesson of history is clear. The time for us to stand around watching their contortions in bemusement is finished.

Allister Heath said it before Christmas. Brexit is coming. In one way or the other it will come.

I don't want to see violent unrest over this. But if the cheating goes on and peaceful reform is rendered impossible then my opinion will change. Political violence is justified in the cause of overthrowing tyranny. And a refusal to respect the clear unequivocal outcome of the referendum is a form of tyranny - it is a denial of democratic rights and a negation of due process.

EU integrationism is underpinned by a type of intellectual corruption. Those of its defenders who cite the lessons of history ignore one such lesson: that historicist projects that base themselves on “progress” always end in disaster. The referendum result is an instruction to our political masters to decouple us from that corruption. And you cannot successfully decouple from what is corrupt while remaining attached, however loosely, to those EU structures which carry the virus of that intellectual corruption. “Brexit means Brexit” is not some tautologous formula into which can be read whatever we want. When we voted to Leave we issued an instruction to leave the customs union, the single market and all those other facilitators of ever closer union, not simply because of what we thought we were voting for, but because of the character and confusions of the EU itself. That is a moral imperative, and the valid concerns of business do not constitute any sort of veto over it.

I'd also suggets you head over to Conservative Woman and read the interviews with Sir Gwythian Prins who explains why the EU is collapsing and will collapse. Best to get out eh? Who wants to be shacked to a rotting corpse?

I rather think that you have under developed your first hypothesis Raedwald.

For me, the whole point of leaving the EU is the need to keep civics and community at a human level, and nation is about as large as the human can imagine, we prefer family, or failing that... tribe, and so on. That is not to say that tribes don't welcome new members. It is just that the tribes aren't forced together by a bunch of avaricious lizards, like Soros, Bezos and other globalists. Globalism is not only anti-democratic, it is anti-progress, and anti-human, it will be the death of our race.

It is that important.

The benefit of leaving to those that would rather remain...

Is that we leavers have wiser heads and we want to save remainers from their own folly.

An excellent post. I am reminded of my long ago and sadly weak attitude to tattooed "yobs". Only to be reminded by my fragrant, sophisticated and quietly spoken wife that these same guys' parents and grandparents kept us out of a European dictatorship in two world wars.

Sadly mass immigration, political correctness and the destruction of once excellent basic education now presents many, many young people as now aimless, ill educated and lost. I suggest a deliberate dumbing down and contamination of our seed corn.

All in the cause of a global elite bent on world dominance. The power and influence to stop grassroots objections and democratic pursuit is now in shameful full view as MPs show their selfish and ignorant behaviour for the personal pursuit of self entitlement. Beyond the rest of us mere mortals. Your post shows exactly their nastiness and unfit character to rule others. To see that placement dwarf Bercow posturing and crowing is borderline nauseating insanity we last saw as the Third Reich marched into Paris.

but the older bloke in the TKMaxx trackies in the Co-op queue at home counting the coins in his palm.

I wouldn't be seen dead in anything from TKMAxx nor 'trackies', but do £10 jeans from the market or 2nd Hand Bundes-'wear' count? I ask because, aside from the fashion fauxpas of some of my peers on benefits (no one over 20 looks good in a shell suit unless they are training for a marathon, poverty being no excuse for showing a lack of class/breeding), I am that 'older bloke- currently counting pennies out of the coin jar to pay the window cleaner this week.

So age and poverty are also no excuse for voting 'leave'. Only a fool would believe that either Brexit or Remain will make life any better for us of the poor. As Christ said, unlike puppies at Xmas, us poor are forever.

PS Raed your post yesterday was brilliant & hilarious (and truer than I would care to admit), meant to say that yesterday but got distracted by Anon.

We've had various attempts at enforcing political beliefs on the population over the decades - Communism, Socialism, Marxism and now Globalism in the guise of the EU (really Communism disguised as Globalism) and they have all, without exception, ended in failure - but not without associated violence.

"I am altruistic for selfish reasons: if our labouring classes can be employed at good wages and the Welfare State can be sustained, then I will be able to live and move around in my country in relative safety."

For if this globalism (or EU mini-globalism) goes on, the 1945 Welfare State is doomed - at the same time as many middle-class people fall through the bottom of the wet paper bag into at least partial dependence on a State that has run out of money. For example, AI will cut a swathe through knowledge workers; and there is a global slowdown ongoing that is not "because Brexit." Perhaps Kondratieff and Irving Fisher were right.

@right write - so you listened to politicians and they lied to you? Uh? See my post above with link. You are the first Leaver I know who was didn't decide years ago we needed out. Maybe try thinking for yourself?

I thought that you could make a stab at justifying Leaving to Remainers as allowing their numerous national gravy trains to continue without the constraint of being mindful of the 'ever-closer-union' mindset and oversight by the Empire. Nationalist parties can campaign more freely, different major parties can create more eye-catching manifestos, most of Britains small businesses will be (eventually) free of unnecessary red tape, we get to keep more corporate taxes on products and services bought here, bigger lobbying operations in Westminster.

Allways assuming that the Establishment makes it through the current Parliamentary embarrassments.

Immediately after the referendum those who voted to leave were branded as anti immigration bigoted racists. I didn't consider that immigration was central to my reasoning, nor many others I know. The most common theme was the total unaccountability of the EU. The blatant arrogance of the various presidents. The red tape which hinders small businesses. The baiting of the Russian Bear in the Crimea. Above all there is the shoddy way in which Britain is treated. Oh, immigration. More Poles, Czechs, Romanians, and others from Europe will be gratefully welcomed. Europe can keep it's replacement population.

I was an active Brexit campaigner in a very remain area. The 2 main objections from remainers were; 'worried about their pensions and investments' or 'I just feel European'. No amount of reasoning could alter their opinions.

Perhaps if your 'reasoning' had included a couple of real, tangible benefits to them and the country as a whole, you might have made a more convincing case. Maybe that is 'selfish' of me, and those you doorstepped, but when you are willing to make us UnEUmenschen then I figure we are entitled to know what the 'upsides' of being de-citizenshipped are going to be...and I don't mean nebulous , ethereal notions of 'freedom' and 'Independence' which will be nothing more than continued slavery to the UN, Westminster and Islam.

It's the same sense of entitlement and arrogance that saw Geldof and assorted hooray Henry's screaming abuse at working class fishermen - who took their small boats up the Thames to protest at the decimation of their livelihoods by the EU and series of compliant British Governments.

And it's the same arrogance that results in the British Government shovelling £13 billion a year or more at foreign Governments and Charity Quangos, whilst declaring that it can't afford to provide decent accommodation or services in deprived British communities.

And it will result in a Corbyn Government; because metropolitan affluent young who want the "free opportunities" they believe EU membership gives them will vote for him - and so will the deprived communities.

The CONS only hope was to deliver a real Brexit quickly and efficiently to demonstrate their competence and still have 3-4 years to demonstrate that it isn't the disaster the Remainers fear. And they've allowed/forced that stupid woman to completely wreck it.

The choice in 1975 was the same: Do we remain as members of the Common Market, or do we leave

http://www.harvard-digital.co.uk/euro/pamphlet.htm

I voted to leave, as I wrote above.

The manner in which my choice was made was by putting a kiss in a box marked "no", I do not remember anything about an out option.

The 2016 referendum was going to have the same choice but an appeal was made to the electoral commission over the negative connotations of the word "no", and so "leave" and "remain" became the agreed options.

Little did we know, although we should have guessed that the real options were "remain" and "remain", the latter was just written differently, it actually read like "leave".

Jack Ketch said: "... I figure we are entitled to know what the 'upsides' of being de-citizenshipped are going to be...and I don't mean nebulous , ethereal notions of 'freedom' and 'Independence' which will be nothing more than continued slavery to the UN, Westminster and Islam".

That is so typical of Remain. It is a trick argument - by attempting to remove the concepts of freedom and independence from consideration the argument is corralled into the areas in which the Remain feels more at home. It is a trick the BBC uses too. Actually, freedom and independence are vital, and the bedrock of our civilisation.

The EU does not give its "citizens" any "rights" that have not been stolen from its member states in the first place - because the EU is an artificial political construct. The most cited "right" by Remains is being able to live and work in another EU state. But that exists because the EU has removed the right of that state to exclude you or just limit the numbers.

And unless a Remain tries to contend that the EU subsidises the UK, the wealth that we have is generated by us, not the EU. The often cited single market may make it easier for us to sell to the rEU but it equally makes it easier for them to sell to the UK. That has been a bad bargain to the tune of about £90bn a year to the rEU's advantage.

The sentence bring together the people of Europe certainly has a flexible meaning........

The argument over 1975 is precisely because those elements WERE NOT MENTIONED in the '75 document (even though they were all planned for introduction) and the people were deliberately deceived by the use of the 'innocent' line you quote.

Reminds me of the man who was told "yes, we can help you with marriage papers, just step inside for a moment" - Saudi embassy in Turkey I recall.....

.. But FCO 30/1048 available at https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/acft/FCO+30+1048.pdf makes clear many of the claims in that pamphlet were outright lies - government and civil servants knew full well the impacts on sovreignty etc the EEC would have.